The recycling of worn railroad rails, which is already widely known, involves heating the rail within a furnace to a plastic state for molding thereof by means of rolling operations. Often, such rolling operations are associated with separate processing of cut portions of the rail, such as its head, web and base. In some instances, all portions of the worn rail are processed along one shaping line into bar products, such as fence posts or rebars.
The recycling of worn rails without cutting thereof has also been proposed, as disclosed for example in U.S. Pat. No. 328,937 to Hargreaves and U.S. Pat. Nos. 852,983, 1,086,789 and 1,206,606 to Slick. Such prior known methods of recycling worn rails have never proved successful in producing a one-piece billet or slab, because of problems created by the formation of laps, seams and folds during the rolling operations, giving rise to quality defects in the product produced.
It is therefore an important object of the present invention to provide a method of effectively deforming a one-piece rail, while heated to a plastic state, by rolling operations which avoid any laps, seams and folds in the formation of billets or any desired cross sectional shape.